Editing 1827: Survivorship Bias

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A common theme in these talks is that the entrepreneur succeeded by persisting through hardship, sometimes despite other people telling them they would be better off giving up. They advise students to do the same, and to keep pursuing their dreams even through subsequent failure. While this isn't necessarily bad business advice, this can give students a biased vision of reality, and lead them to imagine that they will succeed as long as they keep trying.

A common theme in these talks is that the entrepreneur succeeded by persisting through hardship, sometimes despite other people telling them they would be better off giving up. They advise students to do the same, and to keep pursuing their dreams even through subsequent failure. While this isn't necessarily bad business advice, this can give students a biased vision of reality, and lead them to imagine that they will succeed as long as they keep trying.

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This comic makes a joke about survivorship bias, hence the title. {{w|Survivorship bias}}, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently [[#Trivia|overlooking those]] that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further. They may also have "survived" on only some of their attempts.

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This comic makes a joke about survivorship bias, hence the title. {{w|Survivorship bias}}, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently [[#Trivia|overlooking those]] that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further. They may also have "survived" on only some of their attempts. For example, although Donald Trump has many successful businesses, he also had some that went bankrupt.

In this comic [[Hairy]] is giving a talk encouraging people to "never stop buying {{w|lottery}} tickets". This is an unwise investment plan, because the chances of winning the lottery are mathematically very low and the total payout is usually less than the total ticket sales, meaning the expected return from buying a lottery ticket is ([[#Trivia|almost]]) always negative. Survivorship bias applies in this situation since people who eventually win (and, presumably, win more than they've spent on lottery tickets in the time that it took them to win) are much more likely to give inspirational speeches than someone who never won or didn't win enough to make the "investment" worthwhile.

In this comic [[Hairy]] is giving a talk encouraging people to "never stop buying {{w|lottery}} tickets". This is an unwise investment plan, because the chances of winning the lottery are mathematically very low and the total payout is usually less than the total ticket sales, meaning the expected return from buying a lottery ticket is ([[#Trivia|almost]]) always negative. Survivorship bias applies in this situation since people who eventually win (and, presumably, win more than they've spent on lottery tickets in the time that it took them to win) are much more likely to give inspirational speeches than someone who never won or didn't win enough to make the "investment" worthwhile.

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